Abandoned World: The Awakening

It was very strange to look at. Could just renaming his planet to something else be such a threat? The fact that he called the Earth Moon wouldn't change it, even if it did. It will still be the third planet from the Sun, even if it has a different name. Everything will be just as bleak as it is now, and just as hopeless. The best we can do now is to adapt to the conditions we have and still live our lives. And let them call this planet whatever they want, but she, Natalie, is thirty-two years old now, and she still gets so underdressed she wants to climb the wall.

It wasn't hard for her to admit it to herself, but she didn't like the men who were always chasing her. She had short romances, but even if in bed, some of them were okay, there was nothing to talk about with them. And they clearly valued her breasts and ass, not her intelligence. She didn't even doubt that, just as she didn't think she could get very far with that.

And that was important, after all. She had been preparing herself since birth to use her own brains for the common good, and now she was proud to say that she had succeeded. She was now the lead researcher in the science department, and it was her job to study primarily the matter around them for any benefit. And her recent discovery, the extraction of helium-3 from soil, was truly a breakthrough.

It's a shame so few people knew about it. Even if someone had given them access to this information, it would hardly have made a difference. Few people realize that the thermonuclear power plant we have at the station could not work forever without a new boost. At first, the generation of electricity was considered something supernatural, believing that it didn't need to be managed. But very quickly they realized that without human intervention such a system would not work all the time. And that it, like everything else, also needs to be fed with something. The material

was found quickly enough, but it was only six months ago that the department under Natalie Jackson realized how to separate one thing from another so that something else could be used as fuel.

Then Natalie was quietly rewarded by being moved to a larger room in the New York block. She had two rooms, each larger than her previous home. And the people who lived there were much more educated than those who lived with her in the Texas block.

There were four blocks in all: northern Illinois, eastern New York, western California, southern Texas. Appollo-24 was in the shape of a cross with a voluminous center with a branch off to each side with a separate block. Texas, where she'd lived before, was dominated by people from the mining and food section — more laboring and less thinking. Among them were just most of her suitors, with whom she was so dissatisfied. In New York, in addition to the science section, there were also people from the energy section, who were notable for their intelligence and ability to find complex solutions. One of them, Morgan Blackwood, whom she had recently met, had even taken a liking to her.

He was very different from all the others, especially in his intelligence. He literally understood on the fly what could be the cause of some process and began to work in this direction. There was no ostentatious show-off from him — he carefully and systematically considered all the pros and cons of some statement, and then said aloud how they could be perceived. And what was especially attractive was his patience — he didn't seem to lose his temper at all, and the emotions coming from him, which were few, were usually positive.

But the difficulty was that for some reason he wasn't paying much attention to her. It looked like he liked her too, but he didn't really need much of anything. Morgan could keep up a conversation with her, make jokes, show her something, but nothing more than that. As soon as work time was over, he'd retreat to his room.

And the more original way to look at it was that the last project she had to conduct was with him. Morgan was the head of one of the departments in the energy section responsible for monitoring the fusion reactor. Checking, measuring, predicting and being sure of everything that happened to it — that was his central task. Natalie was assigned to investigate the possibilities of expanding its power at maximum efficiency while using Helium-3, which she had just learned how to adapt to use from the surrounding ground.

Morgan showed and told her everything about the reactor's operation. In places where the data was highly classified, he'd said so. He'd even recommended that the two of them petition to release the data to her, but she'd thought that was premature. In truth, though, she just wanted to spend more time with him. He felt safe and secure, as if he was a shield from the problems around him, and when she was in the same room with him, she felt safer than ever.